Notes on Web Design, Development, Standards, Typography, Music, and More

Friday Feast #53: CSS Tips, Page Redirect Tips

Today’s Feast is devoted to CSS with a little JavaScript tossed in to help users.

User-friendly Page Redirects

Craig Saila provides a terrific template to make page redirects much more user friendly. Check out his A Web building tip: How do I make a page redirect the user elsewhere? page. The meta refresh will work with browsers that have JavaScript turned off or isn’t available while the JavaScript will prevent the potential loop created (when users press the back button they land on the redirect page, which in turn takes them to the target page).

While a server-side redirect approach may be more ideal, Craig’s method above can work pretty well for those of us who may not have a server-side option available. Experiment with just the meta refresh tag and you’ll probably discover the looping problem. Adding the JavaScript, as Craig suggests, prevents that potential loop problem for most users.

Styling an hr

How do you style a horizontal rule in CSS? What about browser support? Why are dotted borders designated in the CSS showing up as dashed borders in IE6? Here are some tips to answer those questions.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

As you may know, Internet Explorer does not yet support the <abbr> element. Marek Prokop has provided some JavaScript, though, to make our job easier by automating the process by serving IE users an enhanced version. Opera and Mozilla already support the <abbr> element, so those users won’t get the IE-only added markup. Check out his article about it, Styling <abbr> in IE.